Am I the Only One ?

SO I get a lot of poop from my homebrewing buddies about my Botteling Process. They hassel me becasue 90% of my botteled homebrews are in bottles whose Label has not been removed. I work a FT and PT job, have a SWMBO, and rather spend my time perfecting my brewing process rather than soaking old bottels and removing labels and goo. Afterall isn't half the fun distributing bottels to friends and relatives at different functions to get insight - and by the time they have had a few I have had too much and the last thing I want to do is stumble around and collect the empties. AM I THE ONLY ONE that doesn't give a poop about my labels being removed - I'll tell you what your drinking its, called Heaven.

I've done the same thing (leave the labels on) and have had people go out and buy some, then ask me where i bought mine cause mine tasted better, thats when i usually tell them that I make my own.

I don't remove my labels. I think it is wasting my time...
But your friends and family may get confused when they open a hefeweizen and it end up to be a stout.... I guess that's kind of fun.

I have a problem with this. I mean come on you probably just started that part time job and usually say up late at night doing not much of anything! Would it kill you to throw a 6 or 12 pack in a sink of water every once in a while and let them soak?

Plus when you tell someone they are getting a belgian pale ale and you hand him a bottle that looks like a Rasberry hefeweizen that can cause some confusion!

De-labled bottles look way nicer!

With having commercial and homebrew in the fridge from time to time I and others would get way too confused if I didn't take the labels off. It really isn't as laborious as you're making it sound though. Fill a bucket with oxyclean, let the bottles soak for 24 hours (you need to clean the inside anyway). After 24 hours not much is left on the outside of the bottle anyway. A quick scrub to get any leftover and on the drying rack it goes.

Kilted Brewer said:

With having commercial and homebrew in the fridge from time to time I and others would get way too confused if I didn't take the labels off. It really isn't as laborious as you're making it sound though. Fill a bucket with oxyclean, let the bottles soak for 24 hours (you need to clean the inside anyway). After 24 hours not much is left on the outside of the bottle anyway. A quick scrub to get any leftover and on the drying rack it goes.

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Speak the truth!!!!!

There is more than one way to label your beer in order to decifer it from the other ones - marking caps works for me. So Common So Cheap.

My bottles go in a solution of PBW, labels come off in about an hour or two. But if you still don't remove the labels just slap a piece of masking tape over the label and write what's in the bottle. Confusion destroyed.

I sanitize in a dishwasher, so if I don't take off the labels, they clog up the works. A couple hours in oxyclean takes 'em right off.

I remove all my labels, but I'll admit i'm a little OCD about this stuff.

In fact I almost cut two fingers off yesterday using a box cutter to remove extra thick foil on a wine bottle neck.

Right about the time I thought I should cut away from my own hand was the same time the box cutter attacked me.

I'll be fine though

I have two things to say, first if you just soak a bottle in that wonderful solution called starsan it will remove the label. It makes the glue so soft that if you just run a sponge over it, the whole thing comes off.

Second, most of the time I dont screw around with the labels until they have been soaked enough times in starsan (1 min a piece just to sanitize) to remove the labels. I label all my caps with the date it was bottled. Nice to know the bottle date, and even better to know that its now commercial, haha.

SWMBO doesn't drink beer, but loves it when I make labels for my homebrew. That settles that.

Brewin_CRAZY said:

Second, most of the time I dont screw around with the labels until they have been soaked enough times in starsan (1 min a piece just to sanitize) to remove the labels.

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Not sure if I'm reading your process correctly, but if you're sanitizing bottles in a bucket with labels on them, you're probably not really sanitizing them. The labels and glue qualify as a "high soil load" (refer to the charlie talley interview or the brewstrong podcasts on sanitizing and cleaning). It's most likely overwhelming the sanitizing capacity of the solution.

On the other hand if you're saying that you're not sanitizing them until the labels are off, then we're on the same page...

Leave them overnight in oxiclean, labels come right off, little effort required.

MgMt_Home_Brew said:

I have a problem with this. I mean come on you probably just started that part time job and usually say up late at night doing not much of anything! Would it kill you to throw a 6 or 12 pack in a sink of water every once in a while and let them soak?

Plus when you tell someone they are getting a belgian pale ale and you hand him a bottle that looks like a Rasberry hefeweizen that can cause some confusion!

De-labled bottles look way nicer!

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Yikes. Get over it. It's what is INSIDE the bottle that counts. Seriously, what do you care if someone 800 miles away doesn't feel like removing labels? It's a PITA, and you're going to pour it into a glass anyway. It's just as easy to tell people to ignore the label and look at the cap.

I take pride in and put effort into my brewing. From recipe to bottle. I delabel.

Plus sometimes you can use the labels as stickers hhaha.

Eh, to each his own. I soak my bottles until the labels fall off. If you don't care to do the same, then don't.

Bernie Brewer said:

Yikes. Get over it. It's what is INSIDE the bottle that counts. Seriously, what do you care if someone 800 miles away doesn't feel like removing labels? It's a PITA, and you're going to pour it into a glass anyway. It's just as easy to tell people to ignore the label and look at the cap.

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Yeah I know it's a PITA and thats why I switched to kegs. I am really just giving him a hard time because I am one of his buddies that gives him crap about it and I couldn't resist.

:fro:

I'm the camp of who cares what is on the label. I know what's in the bottle. I'll remove them if I have the time to mess around with it, but it doesn't worry me.

I use bottles that de-label painlessly, and recycles those that don't.

I do it out of habit now. Drink, rinse, soak, gentle scrub. I've got more than I need now but I still delabel. I've given away cases of delabeled empties on Freecycle before just to make it easier on new brewers.

I couldn't care less about labels. eh. A gold cap is mine, and I know what is in each bottle. Besides all my friends know when they come to my house there is only homebrew.

I remove the labels if anything so that I don't have to deal with the confused questions about why it's in a bottle labeled otherwise...

Me: Here, try my homebrew IPA, it's great!
Them: Why does it say Sam Adams Boston?
Me: I reuse bottles from beers I've bought.
Them: Well how do you know that it isn't really a Sam Adams?
Me: Look at the cap...it is blank...and I wrote on it "IPA". That's how I know.
Them: Doesn't that get confusing?
Me: No...just drink the damn beer, I brewed it, it's not Sam Adams.
Them: Oh, ok, thanks!

I'm sure you've all dealt with this multiple times and it gets old lol. So now with a delabeled bottle it goes:

Me: Here, try my homebrew IPA, it's great!
Them: Ok, thanks!

You can see the benefit. Or maybe I only notice this because I'm a new brewer and everyone wants to try my beer.

MgMt_Home_Brew said:

Yeah I know it's a PITA and thats why I switched to kegs. I am really just giving him a hard time because I am one of his buddies that gives him crap about it and I couldn't resist.

:fro:

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Oh. I had no idea. Your lack of smilies in your first post led me astray. Sorry.

Bernie Brewer said:

Oh. I had no idea. Your lack of smilies in your first post led me astray. Sorry.

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haha yeah I was being an a$$hole it's all good.

Whatever works for you...

I would feel pretty lazy, though, if I didn't put forth the very small amount of time and effort it takes to remove the labels and thus produce much more presentable product. My $0.02.

+1 soak in Oxiclean.

I would worry about the cleanliness of the inside of the bottle, if given a homebrew that didn't appear clean on the outside. If it's for your own consumption, and YOU know the inside only has delicious beer in it, no worries.

If you're sharing, clean the labels off.

After a few batches, I stopped worrying about it. Unless I'm sending them off in a swap, giving as a gift or sending to a comp, I never delabel.

I found I was doing double work when I delabeled and put on my own. Then, I was having to delabel all of MY labels for the next beer. A major PITA. For normal household consumption (me, my girlfriend and the occasional friend) I don't mess with it.

I have started soaking my bottles in Oxiclean/PBW to get them clean. As an added bonus, the stuff really helps remove the labels. If there are labels that don't come off easy in Oxi, then they can go to the returns bin.

I prefer to try to make up interesting and fun labels rather than not. To each their own.

Outside of the screen printed ones from Rogue, etc., I won't put my beer in bottles with labels. Just seems...dirty...I dunno.

I leave my empty commercial bottles to the left of the sink after rinsing. Within a couple days the bottle fairies(SWMBO) have the labels removed and they are setting on the right of the sink.

I love that woman of mine.

Ah... You suck...

camiller said:

I leave my empty commercial bottles to the left of the sink after rinsing. Within a couple days the bottle fairies(SWMBO) have the labels removed and they are setting on the right of the sink.

I love that woman of mine.

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I don't remove the labels on the little 12oz bottles i use cause they are Corona's and Sol, both labels are being spray painted on, so i don't know how i could remove that, and i don't give a shiat really... it's what's inside that counts.

I removed those that were on my 750ml cause they are easy to peel off.